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I have just recently started working with cow poo. I can't get it to colonize after I crumble my cakes. The cakes are 100% colonized. I pasteurized the poo for 1 hour at 160 in a pillow case then let cool and squeezed out excess water. This is my third try with no luck. Can anybody provide any help or suggestions. Thanks in advance.

My friend would almost guarantee that your problem is moisture content, as he dealt with the same issue. He resolved the situation by using a mixture of wheat straw and dung rather than dung alone. The mixture is more forgiving and the results are damn near as good as straight dung.

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Fascism (fash'izem) n. A governmental system marked by a centralized dictatorship, stringent socioeconomic controls, and often belligerent nationalism. see also: the Bush Administration.

Sure can. My friend picks up his at a local feed store. He recommends that you not use hay because it is more prone to contamination. Wheat straw is a golden yellow color - hay is green with lots of seeds and shit.

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Fascism (fash'izem) n. A governmental system marked by a centralized dictatorship, stringent socioeconomic controls, and often belligerent nationalism. see also: the Bush Administration.

Thread awakened.... My shit is colonizing slowly also. It is from a pile on a ranch but it has a very little bit of dirt in it. Do ranchers put something in the animals' feed to stop mushroom growth or something? This sucks because I keep hearing about people getting their shit colonized in like 7 days max.

Thats what I'm concerned about. I used around 27% spawn in the poo or 6 out of 22 quarts. I made it pretty wet but it may not be wet enough. I didn't pack it down either so maybe I need to mix it up again and add more h2o2/water to try and get it more moist.

That may be my problem then because I used it with water to avoid contams when I moistened the poo AFTER pasteurization. If I would have pasteurized correctly in the first place I wouldn't have had to re-moisten but I thought that was the safest way to do it. So you think the h2o2 after pasteurization is hurting my colonization time?

That's what I was wondering dragonshrooms, "fresh from the field" is no good. You must leach it and dry it properly. Also, don't incubate your poo like you would a cake or the poo will ferment (2 casings gone bad because of this, IME).

Provide proper air exchnage, make sure your ratios are good, used leached poo, and possibly try another source of poo so you can gurantee no fungicides.

I hope not but I had a couple pf type jars that I used that poo with instead of brf and they started colonizing but never finished. I threw them out after 27 days and they were about 50% colonized. Please tell me that it wouldn't colonize at all if there was fungicide in there because I have a "shit load" of this shit and I hope it can be used.